It Comes in Waves, It Buries Him
by Spring Zephyr
Summary: Monoma wakes up in Bakugou's room. To make matters worse, or perhaps better, his poorly concealed inferiority complex has been uncovered by the most unlikely of sympathizers. By some miracle, Bakugou doesn't even kill him for it. (Shippy gen.)


**This is for Underdog Hero, whom I asked for opinions about Bakugou about a fic where Bakugou awkwardly smushes someone into a hug, and then got me sidetracked with BakuMono instead. I didn't write this with the intention of making it a ship fic – kind of. At some point, I decided I wanted to explore the idea of Bakugou having a very lax attitude towards physical contact ****and Monoma oggling other people for comparison purposes instead, ****but you are more than welcome to read it as gen _or_ pre-slash!**

** Now, if anyone has any plot ideas for making Todoroki _cry_… *coughs nervously***

Monoma knew something was wrong before he opened his eyes. It didn't seem like a bad thing at first. "Different" would have been a better word.

Something was different.

He was warmer than usual, and vaguely aware that he was covered on all sides. A rare occasion, as he normally managed to kick the blankets off his bed halfway through the night, waking up with his shirt hiked past his core. A sweet smell hit his nostrils as he inhaled, sweet and slightly burnt. Sugary. The smell wasn't unpleasant, but it was also the only thing he could smell.

Monoma exhaled. He felt the air hit a wall, puffed back into his face with a sensation that was slightly damp and a little too warm. This prompted a deeper breath through his nose, which he couldn't properly take, due to the wall-like thing muffling his breathing. In his half-sleep, he may have groaned a little bit. In an effort to find a position in which his face wasn't nuzzled against something solid and his breathing didn't feel smothered, he rolled over. The back of his head landed on something –

"For frick's sake. How long is it going to take you to wake up?"

His eyes shot open. The back of his head, it was currently resting on Bakugou's well-rounded bicep.

If waking up to Bakugou as an alarm clock wasn't enough to make him panic, the realization that the other boy wasn't wearing a shirt made his heart surge. Monoma did a quick mental once-over of his being. Shirt, pants, all of the important things were still there. Oh, but those weren't his pants, because Monoma would've gone to sleep in his uniform slacks if Bakugou hadn't lent him another pair. He had most of his memories. Monoma had tried alcohol before – just a little bit, that time Setsuna had sneaked a bottle of sake into the dorms – but this was nothing like waking up after drinking. His memories were still in tact.

Okay, he remembered Bakugou saying something about how he always slept shirtless when it was this warm outside. Asking if that was a problem. Telling Monoma there was no way in hell he'd allow him to sleep on the floor.

He was still missing something. Important details still obscured by the rapidly clearing sleep fog, like why Bakugou would've helped him in the first place.

The bathroom? He remembered being in the bathroom, and crying.

Monoma blinked. His eyelids felt so heavy – jeezus, how hard had he been crying? Why didn't he have the good sense to cry in his dorm room like a normal person? He didn't have to think about that for very long, as the answer immediately popped into mind.

Because Fukidashi's room was right next to his. That guy must have had super sonic hearing or something, because Monoma couldn't do _anything_ in his room without Fukidashi hearing. And he'd been hoping to get through the night without having to answer any unwanted questions the next day.

So much for that plan.

"What else happened last night?" Monoma asked out loud. If there were going to be questions anyway, he was at least calling dibs on the first one.

Bakugou was glaring daggers at him, but Monoma was too fixated on his bare chest to notice. Drawing mental comparisons. He had the physique of a hero, unlike Monoma.

"The hell are you trying to say with that?" Bakugou snarled.

Monoma realized the mistake in his choice of words too late to fix it.

'The body of a hero,' Monoma reminded himself, mind still panicking, 'and the temper of a villain.'

Bakugou wasn't perfect, but neither was he. He instantly switched from making a list of their physical differences to their mental ones. Who had, considered objectively, the worst personality tics. The worst manner of speech. Whether or not Bakugou's explosive anger could be considered worse than his own underhanded, passive-aggressive slights.

Even when he was scared or backed into a corner, words didn't falter for Monoma. If anything, they tumbled out of his mouth easier than ever.

"Hey, shouldn't you be getting ready for class?" Monoma tried changing the subject. "It would reflect poorly on your entire class if you, currently ranked third in Class 1-A, were late."

"Helping people's more important," Bakugou grumbled, shifting his weight beneath Monoma. Monoma thought he was trying to keep his arm still for his sake, but his head still rose and fell with the flex of those muscles, effortlessly. Like Bakugou couldn't even feel the extra weight.

But that was all Bakugou said. He must have been making an effort to keep his temper in check, because the Bakugou Monoma normally encountered would've tried to kill him by now.

"Yes, but it's already..." Monoma glanced at the clock, then recalled Bakugou's first words upon him "finally" waking up. "6:15? How early do you wake up?"

"Alarm went off fifteen minutes ago," Bakugou replied, still sounding angry.

Ah, well. Monoma had been coherent for all of five minutes, and he was already starting on his third or fourth list of comparisons. Ways in which Bakugou was better than he. Ways in which he was worse than Bakugou.

"Look, it's not that weird." Bakugou closed his eyes. His brows pinched together, a look of concentration on his face. "I do this with Eijirou, sometimes – when he stays over studying too late and is too tired to return to his own room. I didn't – it doesn't mean anything and I didn't _touch_ you or anything, if that's what you're worried about. No more than right now, I mean – "

It took Monoma a moment to catch on, this his face went bright red as he recalled what he'd said earlier – _what else happened?_ Stupid, stupid brain!

Quick, think of something else to say –

"I doubt you'd understand, being an elite of Class A and all, but that was merely a tragic case of miswording!" Monoma laughed loudly, obnoxiously, but at the same time he was mentally kicking himself. This was the type of imaginary self-competition against everything that left him crying in the first place.

The words were truth, however. At least to a point. He should've just asked how much Bakugou remembered, like he'd meant to. For some reason, his sleep addled brain had been unable to remember at exactly which point Bakugou had walked in on him.

"I wasn't the one bawlin' my eyes out over not wanting to be alone!"

It didn't matter, because Monoma could remember those things now.

Bakugou, nearly blowing the bathroom stall door off its hinges. Yelling, "How am I supposed to take a middle of the night piss like this?!" while Monoma leaked water from his eyes. "Stop crying or tell me what the fuck is wrong so we can both get to bed!"

Holy shit, that was embarrassing.

Monoma was a perpetual embarrassment to himself.

"I am _so_ sorry you had to see that!" Monoma shot back. "The concept of feeling like a failure must seem so strange to you!"

"Shut up!" Bakugou snapped again, except this time was even louder and Monoma could smell the nitroglycerin forming on his palms.

Bakugou shot up without warning. Monoma's head tumbled off his bicep; he pressed his palms against the mattress and pushed himself into a sitting position, leveling Bakugou's glare with one of his own. Except Bakugou wasn't chewing on his bottom lip, torn between that or bursting into unrestrained laughter like Monoma normally did.

And Monoma shut up.

A piece of his mind, a piece that seemed very out of place given the current situation, nagged that they would end up waking everyone in this block if at least one of them didn't cease talking soon.

No, because that wasn't possible. Everyone who stayed on this side of the campus had probably woken up already. Including Fukudashi, the keen eared bastard.

He studied Bakugou's face while waiting for his heart rate to return to normal again. There had been a brief pause, somewhere between waking up and right now, where he'd forgotten what it felt like to have a jack hammer beneath his ribcage. Too bad it hadn't lasted.

With a sigh, Bakugou's facial features began to smooth over. The transition wasn't fluid, like he was forcing himself to do it – eyebrows lifted back into a neutral position, lips sewn together to avoid baring his teeth. His chest expanded and fell as Monoma watched him breath. His nostrils were probably flaring, but Monoma wasn't looking at his face anymore.

'Not fair', his mind objected. 'Not fair, not fair, not fair – '

That Bakugou got all of the good genetics and the muscles and the good grades and the self-confidence. That there were people like Monoma who would always rank as second rate, because of his stupid copycat Quirk, stupid parents that made him feel like everything he did was wrong. Nothing was worse than being trapped inside your own head, nothing but self-depcreciating thoughts for company.

'Not fair, not good, not _good_ _enough_.'

"Listen up, 'cause I'm only going to say this once!" Bakugou insisted. "You're annoying as hell when you're acting all cocky and shit, but I like you even less when you're crying and acting weird!"

"I don't like myself when I'm 'acting all cocky and shit'," Monoma pointed out, with a dry laugh. He was leaving himself vulnerable far too often lately. "How odd that one of Class A's best would prefer me that way."

Bakugou looked like he wanted to kill him.

"Why do you even care?" Monoma huffed.

"Because a hero doesn't stand by while someone is crying, dammit."

"Are you supposed to be my hero?"

Monoma didn't even try to interpret the silence that follows. He didn't spend any more time analyzing the expression on Bakugou's face, or wondering why the muscular curves on Bakugou's body weren't reflected on his own.

"No," Bakugou replied finally. His voice sounded a bit rougher than usual. "I'm not gonna be your hero. I refuse to be your hero – you gotta do it on your own, or it won't count."

Monoma is a fraction of a second away from protesting, his mind screaming another verse of _that's not fair_, before Bakugou continued.

"But if you ever need, uh, a hug or whatever – ah, fuck it. Go ask Shitty Hair."

And he supposed that counted for something.


End file.
